Fledgling bird discovered by fisherman bulking up under SPCA’s care
Rescued baby eagle on road to recovery
It will be a special Fourth of July celebration today for a skinny, floundering baby bald eagle who most likely would have died if not for an alert fisherman who plucked her from Canadian waters off Navy Island.
Joel Thomas, a wildlife rehabilitator for the SPCA, announced Thursday that the fledgling bird is now doing well after a solid week of medical care.
She is also bulking up by gobbling down lots of whole Rudd, a species of carp.
“When a bird comes in skinny like that, it’s touch and go,” Thomas said, explaining the SPCA’s week-long delay in releasing news about the eagle’s rescue.
“We wanted to make sure she was going to make it.”
She’s a pretty big baby, to be sure.
“I’d say she’s about 26-28 inches tall, with a six-and-a-half-foot wingspan,” said Thomas. “My guess is, she’s been out of the nest about a week.”
She has an eagle baby’s chocolate- colored head feathers, not the white ones that gradually appear as
mature bald eagles reach 5 years of age, Thomas said.
No information was available on the fisherman who rescued the bird a week ago, except that he turned her over to authorities at Grand Island’s Buckhorn Island State Park.
All birds fledge — or get flying feathers — while still in the nest. But sometimes things don’t go well when they first take to the air.
Usually, Thomas said, parents of a fledgling continue to feed and look after it for a time after it leaves the nest and tries its first halting flights, but not always.
“We may never know what happened in this case,” he said. “The patient doesn’t talk.”
She could have glided or stumbled into the water by accident and gotten caught in a current, he said. Or maybe her parents weren’t feeding her, for whatever reason.
Eagles are susceptible to pollution and toxicity ailments. Tests for mercury and lead poisoning and fungal infections, however, all came back negative in this case, Thomas said. He’s still waiting for West Nile virus test results.
Where the young eagle will be released once she recovers has not yet been decided. That call will be made by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which has been assisting in keeping the bird supplied with food.
Connie Adams, a DEC wildlife biologist, said the decision on the best place to release the eagle will be made in Albany by Peter Nye, head of the department’s endangered species unit.
Bald eagles were taken off the threatened species list by the federal government last year, but they still enjoy some special government protections.
Adams said that while the baby eagle appears to be making a quick recovery, the bird will most likely need flight training and more time — possibly a month — to regain her strength before she is released into the wild.
“By that time, her parents and siblings on Navy Island may have dispersed,” Adams said, making her birthplace a perhaps less than ideal spot for her to return.
The last bald eagle rescue in Erie County, Thomas recalled, was in June 2006, when a sick bird was found at the edge of Amherst’s Great Baehre Swamp. That eagle was a victim of botulism poisoning, but it survived after an aggressive course of fluid therapy and antibiotics.
The wildlife division of the SPCA treats roughly 3,000 sick and injured creatures of all kinds in the course of a year.
